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Monthly Archives: April 2010

SETTE DONNE I MACGREGOR was the title that was used on this spaghetti western from 1967 when it was shown on Turner Classic Movies. A little research shows the title in parentheses was used for the American release and UP The MacGregors fore the UK version. It was a sequel to Seven Guns For The MacGregors(American title), but I haven’t seen that one. It is a passingly strange film with a mix of the usual spaghetti violence, well staged fight scenes, and stir in a good deal of comedy. Not a good film, but one of those that the badness entertains and amuses more than outrages.
There are two clans, one Scottish and one Irish, living near each other somewhere in the west. The two heads, feisty old men, have been friends for thirty years. You know the type, drinking and brawling and calling it a good time. In the midst of one of those brawls, the Scottish dressed in kilts and tams(no, I’m not kidding) at a celebration, a band of outlaws attack. Everyone stops fighting, which was both men and women, and take up arms to drive off the marauders. Much to easily.

It was all a diversion to steal the MacGregors gold they’d buried for safekeeping the night before, observed by a Mexican outlaw. A note is left that say, “Thanks and greetings from Frank James!'(yes, that one). It’s up to the seven Macgregor brothers, led by the eldest, Gregor(wince), to get the gold back.

Everyone knows where Frank James lives, so they head there. It gets really oddball here. Frank James is a stereotypical old man/sidekick. You know, a giggly, high-pitched old soul who brags about the old days. Turns out, a Mexican outlaw named Maldonado likes to hang his own crimes on the “terrible” Frank James, who spent ten years in prison for one of those frame-ups. He gives them three cities where Maldonado’s men hang out.

They split into three groups, head out, but are to late. The first small town everyone had been shot dead, the second a bank robbery had occurred, and the final breaks up an attempt to grab women of the Donavon Irish, who are putting up a pretty good fight by themselves.

When the seven brothers learn from a dentist friend they’d lent horses that Maldonado had a bad tooth needing pulling, they sneak into the bandit camp in back of his wagon. This dentist wears the same bloody apron all through the movie. He does have a beautiful daughter though, who has her eye on Gregor MacGregor(wince again), which leads to more complications later in Gregor’s jealous fiance taking off after them, only to get captured.

The brothers liberate, not only their gold, but the entire hoard gathered by the band. Returning, they learn of the fiance following them. Gregor goes by himself to get her. It IS his job. Of course the six other brothers follow and another round of fighting, followed by the band of outlaws attacking the MacGregor stronghold.

Well staged, though goofy fight scenes, dubbed English more than a little silly, a comically inclined Native American addressed as Apache(one assumes he was) with ridiculous sign language. It all adds up to a bad spaghetti western that I really enjoyed. This one goes into that file of movies so bad you love them. There was one good point to the film. The always reliable Morricone again does the score. Although not his best work, it was the best thing about the film.

Charles Beaumont was born in 1929 and passed away way to early in 1967 from a “mysterious brain disease.” No one seems quite sure. Speculation ranges from early Alzheimer’s to repercussions from a bout with spinal menengitis at a young age. He was thirty-eight when he died and “looked ninety-five.”

He was one of the great writers on the original Twilight Zone(The Howling Man, Printer”s Devil among others), wrote movies(7 Faces of Doctor Lao, The Masque of The Red Death), and penned numerous short stories. One of his tales was the first short fiction published in Playboy.

In the introduction, Bradbury speaks of their first meeting and the friendship that grew between them. And a sort of competition. The lived in the same area of L.A. and there was a cemetery they often passed in their travels that had a hand-lettered sign that said free dirt. It set Bradbury’ s mind to thinking, speculating, making notes, and finally starting a story. Beaumont showed up out of the blue one day with a new short story titled FREE DIRT. Bradbury’s story never made it out of his files. Beaumont’s is in this volume.

Bradbury talks of the somberness of so many writers and their readers in relation to their works. Of Beaumont, he says,

“So Charles Beaumont is terribly suspect.There he is, out in the middle of the play yard, yelling with delight, chuckling at ideas, building his castle metaphors, and all too obviously enjoying what he does.”

An impressive group of writers used to spend evenings bouncing around ideas. Bradbury says, “Sometimes, of an evening, Richard Matheson would toss up the merest dustfleck of notion, which would bounce off William F. Nolan, knock against George Clayton Johnson, glance off me, and land in Chuck’s lap. Before anyone could grab or knock it again, Chuck would outline the rest of the tale, sketch in the characters, butter and cut the sandwich, beginning, meat-middle, and end.” Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall during those sessions.

There are twenty-two stories in this collection, two never before published and the others from the fifties. Three were adapted for The Twilight Zone. THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE(as Number 12 Looks Just Like You): a world where everyone undergoes The Transformation at nineteen. A little nip, tuck, bone adjustment, until everyone looks exactly the same. A young woman wants to stay like she was born and everyone assumes she’s crazy. THE JUNGLE: a man is building a dam in Africa. A witch doctor has threatened him if he goes ahead with the project. Back in New York, he hears jungle sounds everywhere he goes. PERCHANCE TO DREAM: a man with a heart condition is afraid to sleep because he dreams of dying and knows the strain might kill him. But staying awake isn’t doing him any good either.

Lots of other wonderful stories here: the vampire seeing a psychiatrist because of his problems being one of the undead, the physicist who tests that old paradox about going back in time to kill his father before being conceived just to see what happens and gets not at all what he thought, five hundred years in the future where people are tube-born and heterosexuality is a crime, a young couple find themselves sneaking around to avoid the law, a new to the suburbs couple find their neighbors more than passingly strange, a man who loves women and is equipped with a computer and a love potion determines that 563 match his criteria for the perfect woman, setting out to meet and bed them all in a year because a new crop turns eighteen every year, and many more.

A great collection of stories, although Bradbury bemoans the fact that he could have added another dozen. Or two. Or three.

SHOWDOWN! has been a favorite of mine for many years now. I’ve followed it through three different formats: vinyl, audio cassette, and CD. 8-Tracks had fell by the way by the time this one came out or I’d likely have one in that one also.
Albert Collins was born in Texas in 1932, was a distant relative of Lightnin’ Hopkins, and was known as “The Master of the Telecaster.” His recording career began in the ’60s and eventually took him all over the world. He passed in 1993 a few months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. Johnny Copeland came from Louisiana, born in 1937, and began his recording career in the mid-fifties. He died in 1997 during complications from heart surgery for a transplanted organ six months previous. Robert Cray was the new blood at the time of this album, born in 1953, and he signed his first record contract in 1982. Collins and Copeland were idols of his from a young age.

The album SHOWDOWN! won the 1987 Grammy for best traditional blues and it is a good one. Separately these three men recorded some great music, but when they got together for this one….

Here are four clips from the album. They recorded nine songs for the release.

Some nice harmonica work here from Collins:

and in this last clip, each of the trio has a turn with a solo that highlight’s each style:

This pair of comics were pretty well known when I was a young man. Their schtick was she would be explaining to him how to play a particular sport(bowling, pool, golf, bull fighting, basketball) and he would think she was talking about sex. A hell or a damn was about the only four letter words they ever used. I had their album on 8-track, that’s how far back they went.

THE BIG BANG is the latest Mike Hammer novel to be completed by Max Allan Collins. The first was THE GOLIATH BONE. It’s set in the mid-sixties and Collins explains the circumstances in a note. Spillane was in the middle of this one when a deadline approached. He put the manuscript aside and substituted a Hammer completed years before, THE TWISTED THING, and never returned to it. The two had extensive talks about the book, as well as others in various stages, and there were plenty of notes about what Spillane intended for Collins to work from while completing the novel.

I became a fan of Spillane like most males of my generation, and likely more than a few females, with the novel I, THE JURY and have loved his work ever since. It seems fashionable these days for some people to crack on Spillane’s writing and I just don’t get it. And I also make no apologies for my love of his books. If you are already a fan, you’ll love this one, if not, you probably won’t. Collins has seamlessly integrated his own writing here such that, unlearned as I admittedly am, I can’t tell where Spillane leaves off and he starts.

Mike Hammer, just back in New York, is leaving from a meeting with a client when he stumbles into the middle of a mugging. Three men are attacking a young bike messenger and he automatically takes a hand. The result, three dead men and one in a hospital(the getaway driver crashes his car trying to leave).

Hammer suddenly has an eager beaver assistant D.A. hovering as he begins poking around. The kid being attacked is innocent enough, a clean kid, and just as he figures it’s a coincidence, nothing for him to involve himself further, he stops a mugger from sticking a knife in his back. Only the mugger is dressed a little well for such an occupation and Hammer leaves him unconscious in the streets. The next day he’s found knifed with his own weapon in the same spot, his wallet gone, and our intrepid detective’s curiosity is aroused even more.

As his investigation begins to uncover connections between the mugger, the three men he’d stopped, and even the kid, he knows something more is going on here. If you know Hammer, he’s never been one to let such things lie. The Big Bang of the title, rumors say, is a major shipment of heroin awaiting entry into the country while a new undetectable method of smuggling is fine tuned.

The body count continues as Hammer starts to unravel things in his own inimitable manner.

I liked this one and look forward to the next. From what Collins reports, there was one more major, uncompleted manuscript and three additional in various stages. Keep them coming.

I was lucky enough to see these boys twice back in the day when they weren’t so damned expensive to attend. I think the cost of my two tickets, plus a friend at each, was about a third of what one good ticket would cost these days. May be less.

Back then they had festival seating which, to the uninitiated, meant first come, first served. There was always a mad scramble for the best spots when the doors were opened. Which eventually led to numbered seats because of some injuries and a death or two at some northern venue. Probably a good idea.

I saw them on the main floor about fifty feet away and sat on the floor between bands. Oh, for those long ago days of my youth when such things as setting on a concrete floor was not a major accomplishment.

These are a couple of favorites. I love the harmonies on the first and the second is just a good rocker.

THE BEST WESTERN STORIES OF STEVE FRAZEE is the second book in the series edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg and published by the Southern Illinois University Press in 1984.
Charles Stephen Frazee was born in 1909 in Colorado. He completed his education in 1937 and taught high school journalism for four years. He joined the United States Navy in 1943 and served for the remainder of the war. Building inspector for the city of Salido from ’50 to ’68. he also served as president of the Salida Building and Loan Association from ’56 on(from Pronzini’s introduction). Throughout the fifties, his family and he lived in a log house he built himself, one patterned after the cabins of the nineteenth century. He was president of the Western Writers of America in 1954 and vice-president in ’72.

The eleven stories in this volume were published during the fifties, his most productive period as a writer, where he turned out twenty novels, several became films and others making the best of lists, as well as a number of fine short stories(One here, The Bounty Killers, was adapted as an episode of Cheyenne). MY BROTHER DOWN THERE, a modern western crime story, won the annual Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine contest and was later included in the Best American Short Stories of The Year. He wrote for a number of television series as well and did a number of tie-in novels(Lassie, Zorro, Swiss Family Robinson, High Chaparral, Cheyenne, and Bonanza).

The stories herein are:

1. The Fire Killer
2. The Man At Gantt’s Place
3. Learn The Hard Way
4. Great Medicine
5. The Brettnall Feud
6. The Luck of Reilly
7. The Singing Sands
8. The Man Who Made A Beeline
9. The Bounty Killers
10. Due Process
11. My Brother Down There

These stories first appeared in such diverse publications as Argosy, Zane Grey Western Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and even Swank. They covered a wide range from comedy to man’s battles against Mother Nature to the savagery of the human animal to the nobility of the same.

Before reading this collection, I wasn’t very familiar with the author and had only read a couple of the tie-ins, an omission I intend to rectify in the future.

Humor is prevalent in The Luck of Reilly, a tale of one man and his dealings with Lady Luck, and Due Process, with a town’s attempts to cope with the shooting death of a bully, get him buried, and the disposition of his “estate.” Though much more serious, The Man Who Made A Beeline has it’s funny moments as two men deal with a very small baby(sort of Two Men and a Baby).

The Singing Sands(filmed as Gold of The Seven Saints) illustrates the greed of gold and the hold it can get on a man, two men. The Bretnall Feud is about two brothers that have hated and fought each other since two. Their father gets tired of it all and sends them away to not come back until they learned something. He would decide then which one would inherit the ranch and the other to be banished from the land. A woman was also involved. Great Medicine has a Blackfoot warrior as the protagonist who takes great chances to steal the medicine that makes a white trapper so strong. The Man At Gantt’s Place has a young man who finds his old father(all of forty) boring and goes out to find his way, learning some things as he grows up. The Fire Killer is of two hunts, a group of rustlers using Big Ghost Basin as a hiding place and a strange creature that kills with brute strength and leaves some of the strangest footprints anyone has ever seen.

All good stories. I guess with the title Best Western Stories they would have to be.

What I liked was the way Frazee painted the western settings with words that put you right there. He understands emotion and what can drive men to do the things they do. The writing is smooth(I think I use that word too often, but I don’t know how else to describe it) and keeps you well hooked. If you like tales that are more than just shoot-em-ups, not that there’s anything wrong with that(my Seinfeld reference), these are worth checking out.